Holiness And Grace

Exodus, chapter 3,.

Exodus 3 · chapter mention

We're going to read two texts this morning.

I have to be honest with you and tell you in a way we are almost outside of the perimeters of this series.

But I have to obey the Spirit of God and I can't get away from this attribute of God called holiness.

And because of that I've just been parked here and I have been praying and saying, okay, it's time to move on to a different attribute of God, and I felt constrained by the Spirit to not be able to do that.

So I'm going with what the Holy Spirit's putting on my heart.

And this is two verses in Exodus 3, and we'll read in 1 Peter 1.

Familiar words, verse 1 of Exodus 3,.

Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God, and the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.

He looked and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.

And Moses said I will now turn aside to see this great sight while the bush is not burned.

And the Lord saw that.

He turned aside to see God called to him out of the bush, moses, moses.

And he said here I am.

Then he said do not come near, take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground, and kindly turn to the New Testament, to the book of 1 Peter and the first chapter of 1 Peter, beginning in verse 13.

I really, really hope these are not new verses to you, but if they are, i pray that the weight of these words would be upon every man and woman hearing my voice.

Verse 13 of 1 Peter 1,.

Therefore, preparing your minds for action and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance.

But as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct.

Since it is written, you shall be holy, for I am holy, father.

This morning we hear these words thundering in our ears and we are reminded that you are the holy one of God And Father.

This morning, our hearts tremble at this declaration by your servant, peter, that not only are you holy, but you have called us with a holy calling to be holy in all of our conduct.

Lord, i'm sure this morning there are a lot of men and women that are wondering how to make ends meet, wondering how to raise kids properly in this environment, struggling with financial burdens and other things, marital tensions, physical maladies, and maybe this morning they came and the farthest thing from our mind was the call on your people to be holy.

But I pray this morning, father, that my words, by your anointing, would awaken us to our call to be holy and we would even see that in responding to this call is the answer to everything else we need.

We ask it in Jesus' name and everyone said Amen.

Most of you are familiar with my personal testimony how God saved me as a young Jewish man in Miami, florida, in 1971, swept into the kingdom at the heyday of the charismatic renewal after God had transformed my brother, who was a drug addict and who was instantaneously touched by God's power and delivered from years of drug addiction.

What you might not know is, after receiving the gospel, I immediately joined a small Pentecostal church in Miami Beach, one I helped start and then my brother helped start, and one that after four years I would become, by a miracle of grace, the pastor of.

One of the things I thank God for in those early days is I learned that believers were called to be different from the world.

This call to be holy was sounded out in my church And I grew up with teaching that reminded us constantly that we were to live separate lives from the world, different lives.

And good thing.

Another good thing was our church saved us the bother of trying to figure out what that meant, because our pastor would constantly give us a series of prohibitions, things we shouldn't do if you're holy Don't smoke, don't drink, don't have premarital sex, don't party and actually don't bowl.

I don't know why bowling was evil.

I learned later.

As the bowl goes into the gutter, it releases demonic power.

So bowling was forbidden, and I grew up believing that all of these prohibitions was what holiness was about.

And it became obvious to me that you do these things or you don't do those things.

You avoid certain things in order to gain God's approval, to get God's favor.

And our church was characterized.

It became evident to me after being there for a couple of years that we prided ourselves on what we didn't do.

Yet I observed a strange thing in my own breast as well as in the heart of others who were in the church.

I observed that while we prided ourselves on what we didn't do, we sure wish we could have.

In other words, our Christian life for the most part was focused on externals the things we were told not to do and the things we were told to do.

Rarely, if ever, did I ever hear an emphasis on the need for the heart to be changed by God's holiness.

I learned that while God was certainly interested in my outward deportment and the behaviors of my life, i never heard that.

I can remember consciously that all of that, the outward expression of Christian living, must be the result of an inward transformation which only the grace of God could do.

It would be years later that I would learn that the call to holiness was correct, but that there was a gospel way of transformation that didn't just clean men and women up on the outside and leave them inwardly defiled, but was inward in that it first radically transforms the heart.

Now we are in a series called a God-worth knowing, and we have been slowly and I think the name is a little misleading because we really have been.

Now this is the third week we will be parked around this attribute of holiness, and last week we saw that God gave a vision to Isaiah of his holiness in chapter 6.

We spent two weeks in chapter 6, and that is God declares to Isaiah his holiness.

Which we saw was God's separateness.

It led Isaiah to a second vision, which we call the inward vision, and Isaiah is undone before the Holy One of God.

He sees the holiness of God and he cries out in agony and pain woe is me.

This prophet, who was so powerful in declaring holiness to his people and indicting them, now turns on himself and he is terrorized in God's presence.

What I want to ask you this morning is a question which the answer will tell you a lot about what you understand about holiness, and it is this why did Isaiah react to God's holiness in this manner?

Why was he so pained when he saw the Holy One of God?

And there is one answer and it is most important answer that will lead us into this message this morning, and it is simply this Isaiah was pained because he understood that God intends for all those who know him to share in his holiness.

That is what Peter is informing us of.

In 1 Peter, he is saying be holy in all your conduct, for there is a God and Peter quotes from Leviticus, i think it's chapter 11, there is a God who said you shall be holy, for I am holy.

What we learn in theology is holiness is an attribute of God that is part of a number of attributes of God that are called communicable attributes of God, things that God not only is but intends for his people to share in, and one of them is holiness.

God's communicable attribute of holiness says whenever men and women are drawn into holiness, god intends for them to be holy, and Peter makes no mistake about it when he says that God has called you and I to nothing less than holiness in every aspect of our lives.

Now I'm wondering this morning something how do you respond to that?

Really, really, really deep within your breast, what do you think of when you hear this statement from Peter and hear me read it that God has called us to holiness?

Typically in the church, there have been one of two responses to this call to holiness.

One is legalism and the other is licentiousness or license.

I'll explain both.

Legalism means that we interpret the call of holiness to focus our attention primarily on our behavior, so that holiness becomes largely about external behaviors.

What I learned in my church as a young believer what to do and what not to do, what games to play, what games you should not play.

Some of what I learned in my church was not legalism, it was biblical.

We learned sexual purity and I thank God for that because that is biblical.

But then it began to bleed into other areas where we were told not to bowl or go to the movies or stuff like that.

Maybe there's some wisdom in that advice, but I found out there's a whole host of church rules that aren't in the Bible.

If you haven't found that out, you will Hang around the church.

But other people respond to the call of holiness by licentiousness, which essentially means that we lessen, minimize the demands of holiness and tell ourselves God loves me and we're under grace.

So really, man, it doesn't matter how I live, it really doesn't matter.

In other words, we take one of two positions.

We either look at the standard of holiness and shrug our shoulders and say, get real, this is 2011.

Or else we break into a sob and look at the demands of holiness and say, no way, i can never do this.

Let's take a moment and look at both for a minute, because it's critical that we understand the difference.

Let's start with licentiousness, a fancy word that implies this I'm going to get out of the demands of holiness all my life.

I'll choose to dismiss it as an impossible standard.

When a man called me this week from another state to confess to me that he was struggling with internet porn, if I was a licentiousness pastor, i would have said look, man, this is 2011.

God understands, he's gracious, he understands.

He can't expect you to live a pure life in such an impure world.

You can be under licentiousness when you hear, when you say to yourself you know, marriage is hard.

God can't possibly mean that I'm supposed to stay married to my partner for life.

That's what he originally meant, but this is 2011.

What we do when we're living, when our response to holiness is licentiousness, what we are doing is we are distorting grace by lowering the standards to justify our lifestyle, and one of the ways we do that is we suggest that, because we're loved by God, it doesn't matter how we live.

Incidentally, there are books of Scripture written to correct this error, books like Jude, which opens with these words beloved, although it was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, i found it necessary to write to appealing you, to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered for the saints.

For certain people have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were designated for this condemnation.

Ungodly people who pervert the grace of God into sensuality and deny our only master, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Notice Jude's indictment.

They creep in and they pervert the grace of God in order to hide their sensuality.

So let me tell you licentiousness is not a new problem.

The early church dealt with it as well.

Rather than change and call people to change, people have, for two millenniums, been lowering the standard so that I can fit in, and we do it under the banner of grace.

Now let me give you something that will help you for the latter part of this message, but I'll speak it right now.

Settle this in your heart Grace does not mean that God doesn't have any standards anymore and He just overlooks everything.

Are you with me?

In fact, grace can only be understood where the highest ethical standards exist.

Grace doesn't lessen those standards, as we will see.

It allows us, by empowering us, to live out the demands of holiness in a totally different way than being under law.

But the standards of holiness are God's and they never can be messed with.

But most of us in this room thankfully, hopefully, do not fall into the licentious camp There's probably some.

Most of us make a different error in approaching the matter of holiness.

What we do is say I heard your message on holiness, now I have to do something about it.

I've got to go and clean up my act before God will receive me.

The thinking is and the problem with that is not that we don't need to change, that's true enough But the problem is we're not approaching holiness from a biblical perspective.

We think of it as an act of our willpower.

I, now Jesus, did it all.

Now I have to respond and clean up my act and do something.

And the problem with this is we are approaching it as if holiness is simply a matter of willpower alone, that if I have enough willpower I can change.

And, by the way, one of the results of this thinking has been the victorious Christian life syndrome.

I'd like to refer it to that.

Somehow one day.

One day, i'm going to be victorious And we have a bunch of Christians running around and they go to altar call after altar call rededicating their dedication.

This is the day And remember in our Pentecostal church I probably told you this.

We had a wonderful service every Tuesday night.

We called it condemnation night.

That's where the preacher beats you up for your failures and you ran to the altar and said I will rededicate my dedication.

But it doesn't happen And the result is there are many men and women sitting in this room who are walking around condemned because they haven't reached some plateau of victory they have been told they should reach.

Now I'm not suggesting that will our wills do not play an integral part in the process of sanctification, of being made holy?

for they do.

The problem is, before your will can be engaged in the process of being made holy, you first, and I first, have to realize that, just like justification, holiness or sanctification is a provision God gave us in Christ, which means it can only be obtained by grace, through faith, and there are multitudes of scriptures that make this clear.

It is untrue to say justification God did.

Sanctification is all my work, and it's true that sanctification demands a cooperation.

But listen to God's word And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.

And so this Paul includes holiness, sanctification, as being gifted to us in Christ Jesus.

Look at this scripture or listen to it.

We won't turn there.

It's in 1 Corinthians 611, after Paul lists all the wickedness in the culture and then he says and such were some of you.

You were just like this, but you were washed.

You were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of God.

Another word for that is you were washed, you were made holy in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of God.

Both these texts and there are more that I could cite, but we won't Both of these instruct us that holiness first, like justification, is a provision of God given to us by the gracious work of Christ.

That means beloved, that if you and I are ever to achieve holiness, faith must first lay claim to what God did in Christ in setting us apart and making us holy through the death of His Son on Calvary.

And it is the reality of what was done for us by grace that breaks the power of sin in our lives.

Now our text this morning instructs us in this very thing in a powerful picture way.

Here's Moses minding his own business, leaving his flock on the backside of the desert, and he sees a strange sight.

Have you ever considered why God appears to Moses in this manner?

Strange sight He sees a bush burning.

It's not unusual In a hot summer day in the Sinai wilderness to see a bush that had been ignited by the blazing sun.

That didn't attract Moses in itself.

What attracted him, we are told, is he saw this bush burning, yet not consumed.

What is interesting and helpful for you to know here is the Hebrew word for bush in this passage in Exodus 3 is Sena, which literally is a thorny bush.

It grows in that part of the world.

You can still see them today, the thorny Achesia bush, and it's thorny and it's, i guess it's prickly.

I've never seen one, but it is literally translated, if you translated properly.

He saw a thorn bush ablaze with fire and not being consumed.

I wonder this morning if you immediately thought of something when you realized that the bush that Moses saw burning was a thorn bush.

What is the first instance of the word thorn in the Bible?

Anybody In the fall of Adam, god judges the ground and you remember what he says to Adam and Eve?

he says by the sweat of your brow, you will toil and thorns and thistles, the ground will yield.

Instead of cooperating with you, adam, now the ground will resist you and instead of producing fruitful harvest which it will, but it also you will have to glean that harvest from the thorn of the earth.

And so the picture of thorns is a picture of the cursed earth which God pronounced in Genesis 3, immediately after the fall.

Not only were Adam and Eve fallen, the world was fallen, the ground was cursed, and the evidence of the curse is it produces thorns.

Here you have a thorn, bush, the perfect expression of cursed and fallenness.

And now you have the fire of God.

By the way, fire is an emblem of God's holiness throughout the entire Bible.

Wherever fire is, it portrays God in His awesome holiness.

And here the bush, which is a picture of the cursed earth, is consumed with fire, yet it's not consumed, it's not burned up.

How many know?

God's holiness in a fallen world will always judge and consume that which is cursed, but when Moses sees a tree, it's not consumed.

This can only mean one thing What an incredible picture of grace.

The fire of God's holiness should consume it, but it doesn't.

And it is this, unlike Isaiah, it is this which draws Moses, this grace picture, this fire of God that should destroy, that is not consuming.

It's this that is used by God to draw Moses to holiness.

I couldn't help it When I knew this was the thorn bush.

I also realized, or thought, of something else.

I thought of the one who wore the thorn, the crown of thorns, on our behalf, who took into his own person the fire of God's wrath for sinners, who consumed it in his own person.

We who knew no sin became sin for us.

Christ was made I'm quoting from Galatians a curse for us, so that we might be the righteousness of God.

All of this, and the reason I took time to explain it to you this morning, leads us to this lesson.

The lesson is clear.

The bush teaches us that the first step towards holiness is not to try to clean up our act so that if we somehow get it together, god will respond to us.

Rather, it is first, as always, to see and apprehend God's provision in Christ.

By grace for our holiness, god did it all.

The bush is not consumed, and when we draw near to God, we're not drawing near to a God who's vengeful and angry and looking for an excuse to destroy us.

We're coming to a God who, in Christ, is and has made provision for our holiness, and holiness is gifted to us just as justification.

There is a picture of this in the children's version of Pilgrim's Progress.

I don't know how many of you have read Pilgrim's Progress I've got to work And then the children's version of Pilgrim's Progress.

The Pilgrims are on their journey and they discover a mirror.

Remember the mirror they discovered?

And when they look in the mirror on the front side, as they gaze at themselves in the mirror, it's an ordinary mirror and it gives them their reflection, warts and all.

But when you look at the mirror from the backside, it has an image of the crucified Lord Jesus on the back.

So anyone looking in that mirror from the front will see what he or she expected.

You will see in that reflection your person, with all of your scars and all of your blemishes.

The mirror never lies.

It stares back at you and gives you an accurate portrait.

But if you look at the same mirror from the rear, you would only see the glory of the Son of God, and this is God's.

This demonstrates how it is that sinners are made holy in this life.

Their holiness first of all, must never be something we view as achieving for God, but that which grace alone supplies through his personal, perfect work.

Here's the amazing thing about that mirror image It portrays that grace is God's willingness to look at his people from the perspective that sees his holy Son in our place.

You see, satan loves for believers to not view themselves from the back of the mirror but from the front, and then get busy on an elaborate works program to try to clean themselves up, so God will receive them.

What we must be trained in, which is called faith, is understanding that God is viewing our lives from the backside of the mirror.

Many years ago, philip Brooks came up with an acrostic How many have ever heard of it?

G-R-A-C-E, and he called it God's riches at Christ's expense.

God's riches at Christ's expense.

And this acrostic beautifully illustrates the truth that the blessings which Christ alone deserves, the blessings that belong to him, are now ours, not because of achievement, but because of what he has done.

And many believers start their Christian life with this, but then they get on the performance treadmill.

I actually heard somebody say it recently Okay, jesus did certain things for you.

Now he wants you to prove by an endless array of works that, by doing things, he's justified in keeping loving you.

I call this performance treadmill, because it consists of a perpetual attempt to win God's favor.

Now maybe you're thinking this morning Well, if I approach holiness this way, i would not trust myself.

Neil, isn't a focus on God's unconditional love and the grace which makes us holy, don't I?

aren't I in danger that if I focus on that alone, it will promote a lifestyle of anti-nomianism a fancy word that means against law.

But for laymen here this morning, we are convinced that if we give ourselves to the grace and love of God, somehow we won't care anymore how we live.

But that's not.

That is not the picture presented to us at the bush.

When Moses draws near to this picture of grace the fire of holiness not consuming that which should be judged There's a second response.

He's drawn near to it because the beauty of holiness draws sinners to it.

And then he stopped in his tracks And God says don't come any closer.

Take your shoes off your feet, for the place in which you are standing is no longer cursed, it's holy ground.

God drew him to holiness through love, and now holiness makes certain demands.

Now we know that taking your shoes off was a respectful response to the presence of God.

But how do you walk when your shoes are off?

What's the word, the optimum word, to describe how you walk when you're walking without shoes?

I used to in our West Knoxville home.

We had a long driveway and I always insisted in taking the garbage out.

With no shoes on, a 30 second trek became a five minute ordeal.

Because when you walk with your shoes off, what's the optimum word that describes how you walk Carefully, you never know what you're stepping on.

If you and I appropriate, by faith provided for by God's perfect work in Christ, the holiness which is ours, it will cause you to walk different.

It will deliver you from that licentious notion that, wow, i'm loved by God, so it doesn't matter how I live.

That is not how you will respond.

If you're in Christ and you appropriate in Christ the grace which makes you holy, you will experience what God told Abram.

He said I am Almighty, god, walk before me and be thou perfect.

Now you may learn that you've been under a legalistic tendency to say that the Christian life is all about what I can't do, and I'm amazed.

I am amazed at how Christians will fight over things like drinking, but they'll never address pride, lust, arrogance, know those things ever come into play and we focus entirely on externals.

But when you are approaching this bush, which typifies God's grace, you will never walk the same, let me assure you this morning.

For those who are concerned, resting in God's love and grace does not relieve us of holy obligation.

Rather, it allows us to fulfill holy obligation, because what happens is grace so changes our hearts that we cease striving to love Him for our own benefits and we begin to manifest that selfless love which alone brings Him glory.

You see, there's a profound difference.

Listen carefully.

There's a profound difference between our obedience being a grateful response to God's grace instead of being that which tries to bribe God to get Him to bless us.

When I was debating the Judaizers last week in North Carolina, i said why are you focused on the law?

They said because we want to be blessed and you're blessed if you keep the law.

And we shouted out no, no, no.

That is not where blessing comes from.

That is a denial of the new covenant, and they love to hear that.

You see, the pursuit of holiness then becomes a delight Rather than a chore that I must live out, and what we learn is that it is our union with Christ, rather than any merit of our own, which is the basis of holiness as well as our justification.

And so what happens is true holiness always avoids the pitfalls that both legalism and license try to begin.

Try to assert Legalists try they confuse true holiness by only focusing on outward performance.

Now don't hear me to be saying it doesn't matter about anything outward.

If you're truly holy, it will become outward.

But what happens when you focus, as a legalist, on outward performance is we tend to gravitate towards rules and restrictions that overlook the real issues of the heart.

Everybody, listen to me, this is not about outward externals.

Primarily, it is a condition of the heart.

It begins within and grace changes us at heart level.

What Elfam happens to is when we're legalists, we tend to gravitate towards rules that aren't in the Bible, rules that arguably fall into Romans 14 categories Convictions that you can have that are fine as long as you don't make them commandments for others.

I don't mean to suggest that there aren't external standards to uphold.

It's just that, without the knowledge of what God did in Christ, the Christian life can become merely a matter of externalism.

Take the issue of Bible reading and prayer.

No one in this room believes it's more important than I do that we wake up and spend time in God's Word and prayer, but I have seen Christians make that a rule and an obligation that beats them over the head.

So they come to the Bible every morning out of obligation.

I got to read the Bible and prayer becomes a chore.

Let holiness touch you in the core of your being by first seeing it as something God did in Christ, and your attitude towards prayer and Bible reading and other duties of the Christian life will be transformed.

And you can know.

You can know if you've fallen into the legalism approach to holiness, because you will soon begin to adopt the attitude of the Pharisee in Luke 18.

I thank you, god, that I'm not like other men.

Look at that slob.

He's still blanks.

He's still this.

I thank you that I'm a better Christian than that.

Or maybe you fell into the license camp when it came to holiness.

All this talk about holiness it's not achievable in this life.

The standards are impossible.

So I'm just going to live any way I want and call it grace.

You can call it grace, but a great German pastor, theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called it cheap grace, grace that never changes me at all, but just excuses any behavior.

It's true that God has removed good works as a ground for our acceptance, but he has not removed righteousness as a requirement of this life.

So what this morning is empowering you and I to be holy, is it legalism drumming you over the head this morning?

May you have an awareness and an open heaven.

May God open the scriptures to you to show you that holiness is first and foremost provided for by Christ Jesus and it's a gracious gift of God to you.

You have been set apart in Christ already.

If you're in Christ Or maybe you're in the license camp and you tried living by all the rules, maybe many of which aren't even in Scripture, and you gave up on it and the Christian life to you is just too hard, you know you can never live it.

Repent of that this morning and find in Christ again the provision of everything you will ever need for real holiness.

Brothers and sisters, it's all in Christ When Peter tells us God has called you to be holy in all your conduct, for it is written be holy, for I am holy.

He is not woofin', he is not scaring us.

He is inviting us to be separate from all that defiles to live differently, because at the core of my being I've been transformed.

This is God's provision to you and I in Christ.

You are holy if you're in Christ Before you try to live out holiness.

Just as God is separate, so you have been separated, but please don't try to be holy by seeing it as a work you have to perform somehow to earn God's approval.

Come this morning and be enticed by God Himself in grace.

The fire burning that which is cursed and yet it's not consumed.

What an incredible picture of what God in Christ offers us.